Oxford topography : an essay / by Herbert Hurst.

  • Hurst, Herbert, 1833-1913.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Oxford topography : an essay / by Herbert Hurst. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    powers of Agas have vindicated themselves completely. On the top of the Castle mount stood once a castle keep; its general contour being not unlike the sketch now hanging in the Christ Church bursary, minus the fashionable windows and crenellations. Now that a trustworthy representation has been found, those who ridiculed Agas are themselves in a similar plight. There are three dates to the Map. 1578 is on the title; on a small medallion at the bottom is ‘ Augustinus Ryther Anglus deliniavit 1588’; in the verses over the scale, we have ‘. . . would make sheow, how it (London) was beste beseene | the thirtieth yeare, of our moste noble queene ’ [1587-8]h The payment by the University took place in 1578: there are, then, two sets of contradictory statements. The word ‘ thirtieth ’ in the verses shows no sign of having been tampered with; but yet the'medallion of Ryther, being of more delicate workmanship, may be an addition made when, as may have happened, the plates became his own property, and when he lived as a printseller near Leadenhall. The date is of no very great importance, whether 1578 or 1588; the Map was clearly executed after the large woodcut of London, and before the engraving of Cambridge, that bears John Hammond’s name, with the date 1592. Dodd only, in his Connoisseur s Repository, Pt. I (12mo, Manchester, 1825), speaks of a Cambridge Map by Agas dated 1578, probably concluding in haste that the two early maps of the Universities now in the Bodleian were by the same hand, and engraved in the same year. As Jesus College, Oxford, was established about 1571, it is sur- prising to find its site occupied by the two White Halls and very little else, but on the other hand Jesus College did not effect much in the way of building till 1580, when that part of Agas’s task may have been accomplished. Setting aside the unverified pro- duction of 1578, it is worth noticing that Cambridge attained its first befitting plan within four years of the completion or publishing of the Oxford Map. This may be a kind of sequence to the dispute about the relative antiquity of the two Universities; it may be, too, that the same plotter was employed by both. Certainly Agas’s name does not occur on the Cambridge Plan, yet the execution and the colouring are so similar in both, that the best judges have set down the later one, some as belonging to a similar school, some as proceeding from the same school, and others as the genuine 1 The lines ‘ Quae tibi mater erat &c.’ and the shield bearing Sir Christopher Hatton’s arms, encircled by the Garter, cannot be earlier than 1588, the year in which Hatton became Chancellor of the University.
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